Q-Ships and Their Story

One of the effects of the British blockade on Germany was to prevent such valuable war material as iron reaching Germany from Spain. Now Spanish ores, being of great purity, wer...

On November 9, 1915, the Admiralty, who had taken up the steamer _Penshurst_ (1,191 gross tons), commissioned her at Longhope as a Q-ship, her aliases being Q 7 and _Manford_. T...

Independence of character is a great asset in any leader of men, but it is an essential, basic virtue when a man finds himself in command of a ship: without such an attribute he...

It was on February 17, 1917, that Commander Gordon Campbell, still in command of _Farnborough_, now named Q 5, again sank a submarine, but in circumstances which, hid from publi...

In the summer of 1914 I happened to be on a yachting cruise in the English Channel. In July we had seen the Grand Fleet, led by _Iron Duke_, clear out from Weymouth Bay for Spit...

In order properly to appreciate the difficulties of the Q-ships, it is necessary to understand something of the possibilities and limitations of the U-boats. No one could hope t...

During the ensuing months many demands were made on the sailing-ship man-of-war. There were pressed into the service such vessels as the schooner _Result_, the 220-ton lugger _B...

If, in accordance with the delightful legend, Drake during the recent war had heard the beating of his drum and had ‘quit the port o’ Heaven,’ come back to life again in the ser...

In history it is frequently the case that what seems to contemporaries merely ordinary and commonplace is to posterity of the utmost value and interest. How little, for example,...

Most people would have thought that the sail-driven decoys would have had a very short life, and that they would speedily have succumbed. On the contrary, though their work was...

In the spring of 1917 there was a 2,905-ton steamship, called the _Bracondale_, in the employment of the Admiralty as a collier. It was decided that she would make a very useful...

The unrestricted phase of submarine warfare instituted in February, 1917, had, apart from other means, been met by an increase in the number of Q-ships, so that by the end of Ma...

All warfare is merely a contest. In any struggle you see the clashing of will and will, of force against force, of brain against brain. For the impersonal reader it is this cont...

We turn now to the northern mists of the Orkneys, where the comings and goings of the Grand Fleet were wrapped in mystery from the eyes of the world. In order to keep the fleet...

Two days before the end of February, 1916, I happened to be returning from leave in England to my ship, which was in Queenstown for boiler-cleaning. In the Holyhead-Kingstown st...

Within five weeks of her victorious fight _Baralong_ had done it again. After the war it was definitely announced in the public Press that U 27 had been sunk by H.M.S. _Wyandra_...

One of the great lessons of the Great War was the inter-relation of international politics and warfare. It was an old lesson indeed, but modern conditions emphasized it once mor...

It was the activities and successes of the submarines in the western end of the English Channel that had made these small Q-sailing-ships so desirable. The first of these to be...